The applications that run the modern enterprise rely upon, in some way, shape, or form, the operating system. Forming the linchpin of business IT, the operating system serves as the foundation for service and application innovation. Today, we’re pleased to announce the latest update to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform with the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5.

Powering business applications with greater control, confidence, and freedom, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta is designed to provide a consistent foundation across the hybrid cloud and offers key new and enhanced features around security and compliance, platform efficiency, and manageability. Additionally, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues to support alternative architectures, with variants available for IBM Power, IBM System z, and Arm deployments as well as x86.

Security improvements and usability enhancements for cloud and remotely hosted systems that can more securely unlock Network Bound Disk Encrypted devices at boot-time, designed to eliminate the need for manual intervention in an often inconveniently-timed boot process.

The integration of Red Hat Ansible Automation with OpenSCAP, which enhances the ease of automating the remediation of compliance issues and enables administrators to more efficiently scale policies across their environment.

Compliance improvements for accurate timestamping and synchronization needs with the addition of failover with bonding interfaces for Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP).

Performance and efficiencyModern enterprise applications can require extensive amounts of bandwidth and resources to handle the increasing quantities of data produced by organizations, a problem that is compounded as businesses drive towards digital transformation. Much of this data is the same, which can limit efficiency and increase resource costs for IT. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta introduces virtual data optimizer (VDO), a technology derived from Red Hat’s acquisition of Permabit assets and designed to reduce data redundancy through inline deduplication and compression.

In a primary storage environment delivered on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, internal testing has shown that VDO can increase effective capacity by up to 6x, helping to free up existing storage and reduce the costs associated with offsite data replication. These savings, extended to block storage in the public cloud, can reduce storage footprints by up to 83 percent, helping to reduce the hourly cost for active storage and the monthly costs of storing snapshots. This enhances the ability of organizations to get the most out of their existing storage configurations across a common, open standards-based platform in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Platform manageabilityAs part of a digital transformation strategy, enterprises should emphasize delivering new, innovative services and products while limiting the amount of time their IT teams spend manually managing underlying infrastructure components, including the operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta enhances usability for Linux administrators, Windows administrators new to the platform, and developers seeking self-service capabilities alike with:

An easier to use cockpit administrator console, which is designed to simplify the interface for managing storage, networking, containers, services, and more for individual systems.

The automated creation of a “known-good” bootable snapshot to help speed recovery and rollback after patching, helping IT teams feel more confident that their systems are in working order.

For more information on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta, please check out the release notes. You can also try out the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform yourself at https://access.redhat.com/downloads/.